The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous Read Online Free PDF Page B

delegation came down the steps; Camera bulbs flashed as they shook hands with some dignitary sent to receive them. It was the Honourable Mr George Fernandes, minister for something or the other.
    I met George several times after the Janata Dal government was thrown out of power. When I asked him about his past, about his underground days as the elusive pimpernel, he said, ‘No politician in India has had more bones in his body broken than I. Nor perhaps has anyone been in as many jails as I have. The police thought I was in the garb of a sadhu, so they went about interrogating sadhus. That was too obvious a camouflage. I let my beard grow and taught myself how to tie a turban. The beard grew fast enough, though the hair on the head remained short.’ When he travelled around the country by air, he booked himself under my name for no better reason than he could not think of another Sikh name. ‘But you can’t even speak Punjabi, and here many people know me,’ I said to him. He smiled and replied, ‘I said I was born and brought up in Canada. And no one ever asked me whether I was Khushwant Singh.’ He knew only three Punjabi words: Sat Sri Akal.
    It was after several months that the police realized that George was disguised as a Sikh, when he made the mistake of staying in one place longer than he should have. A note he had sent to a friend to get money led to his arrest in Calcutta. The police wanted him to admit he was George Fernandes and not Mr Singh, which he stoutly denied. The police then tried to break him down. He was too important a politician to be subjected to the third degree, but they did their worst to frighten him. They took him into the jungle to give him the impression that they would shoot him and pass it off as having killed him in an encounter. After they brought George to the Red Fort, they changed tactics. They used the filthiest abuses. ‘Ma, behen, beti, no one was spared,’ George told me. ‘Then they stripped me naked—a naked man feels very defenceless and betrays himself. While two officers were interrogating me, there were dozens of eyes watching every movement of mine from behind glass panels. They gave me a rough, prickly blanket to sleep on—it was like lying on a bed of nails. When none of this worked, they tried to break down my morale by other devious means.’ After many hours of grilling in a hot interrogation room, they would ask George if he would like chilled beer, lemonade or ice-cream; when he would say ‘Yes, thank you’, nothing would come.
    After the anti-Sikh violence of November 1984, following the assassination of Mrs Gandhi, I met George frequently. He set up a relief organization to rehabilitate the families of victims. I received a lot of donations from Sikhs living abroad; I passed them on to George’s organization for disbursement. Then I saw George as defence minister. There was not the slightest change in his behaviour. No red light on his car, no sirens blowing, no escort.
    George was never a one-woman man. I heard of many women who befriended him, including a starlet in Bangalore. One such woman I knew well was the dusky, curvaceous beauty Olga Tellis. I lost track of George for a while after he married Humayun Kabir’s daughter, Leila, a Bengali Muslim; though she bore him a son, the marriage did not work out. I saw a great deal of Jaya Jaitley, who was George’s companion for twenty-five years. I had known her as a schoolgirl, when her family lived in the neighbouring block. She was the heartthrob of all the boys with her in school and college, including my son, Rahul.
    There is more to George Fernandes than a swashbuckling comprador of Indian politics. Who, besides him, a South Indian, could win elections from Bihar? Who, besides him, could charm anyone he met? It is a thousand pities that he has been stricken by Alzheimer’s disease. Your memory goes, you can’t tell one person from another. And you gradually sink into oblivion. I know, because my